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How-To Geek

If you are a big fan of both Google Reader and Firefox, you’ll be interested to know that Google’s iPhone version of Reader is a perfect fit for the Firefox sidebar, and with a few tweaks we can make it really fit well.

We can customize it to remove the header, choose our start page, tone down the fonts and even remove the excerpts to give us a nice clean list like this one:

Add Google Reader iPhone Edition to the Firefox Sidebar

All you have to do is right-click anywhere on the bookmarks bar and choose New Bookmark, give it a name (or leave that blank) and put in the following URL:

http://www.google.com/reader/i/

Make sure you check the box for “Load this bookmark in the sidebar”, and you are done.

Now when you click the bookmark, you’ll see that it opens in the sidebar.

Change Bookmark to Open Specific Tag (or page)

The first problem is that the bookmark opens to the all items view by default, which is bad for those of us with a very large number of subscriptions. I prefer to open Reader with my “favorites” tag selected by default, so we’ll have to adjust this.

Navigate in the sidebar to the tag that you want, and then right-click in an empty area of the page and choose “View Page Info”

Now you’ll see the direct URL to that page, which you can copy to the clipboard…

And then either use in a new bookmark, or customize the existing bookmark that you created.

Now whenever you click on the bookmark, you’ll see the page you’d prefer to see.

Remove the Ugly Blue Border

Note: For the rest of the tweaks you’ll need to have the Stylish extension installed, or you can create a file named userContent.css in your Firefox theme directory and put the code there.

For whatever reason, the Google Reader logo has this annoying blue border around it, but we can remove that with a quick Stylish script.

Click on the Stylish icon, choose Write Style and then Blank Style.

Give the style a descriptive name, and then paste in the following text:

Comments (20)

Note: to make the content changes you do not need the stylish extension, you can just add the code in your blog to the userContent.css file in your firefox profile/chrome folder. At least that is what I did and it work beautifully, thanks!

For some reason this doesn’t seem to be working for me, can’t figure out why copied the code as is, tried in both stylish and in the UserContent file as Bill suggested, but none of the changes take affect on preview or even when I reload the page itself.

Man, this is great, thanks a lot!
If anyone knows how, I am interested in two additions:
1) I there could be a way to remove the text on the bottom, or make it smaller, that would make the experience even more clean. We’ve already removed the logo!
2) Some sort of button for moving between items. Like the “Next item” and “Previous item” in the real google reader. I know this was designed for the touchable only iPhone, but there should be some way, no? (Keyboard shortcuts, maybe?)
Thanks again!

You can now add friends to your friends list, share feed items, bookmark single blog posts from blogs that you read on the web and hereís the kicker, there is now a blog recommendation engine that recommends blogs you do not read by what your friends list is subscribed to in their Google Readers.

Then, everything you share and bookmark in Google Reader of course comes up on your Google shared items page linked to by your Google profile.

What really blew me away was the recommendation engine. If you add as many of your email list subscribers as you can to your Google Reader you can get a real good idea of what other blogs your subscribers are reading.

The links in your shared items are all HTML and fully followed so every time one of your RSS subscribers shares a blog post it is creating incoming links to your site.

Better yet, it uses the exact blog post title you wrote so now your links use your keyword phrases and bookmarkers canít change your title tag.

After talking to my SEO top dog contacts, they were all floored and assured me this is the new SEO tactic that no one knows about.

It is kind of hard to add friends, the easiest way is to send a chat invite from Gmail and then email your contact you want to friend and have them email you back. It seems Google wants a two way conversation before they will allow you to become mutual friends.

If you would like to friend me, add chrislang at gmail.com to your Google Gmail chat and send me an email letting me know so I can return an email to you, thereby creating a two way connection in Google.

Google is quietly rolling this out behind the scenes but it is a full blown social bookmarking application and the blog recommendation engine is the new blog marketing strategy.

One thing I have not quite figured out is if using FeedBurner now hurts you since the links point at the FeedBurner redirect rather than your site like a WordPress feed does.

I had a issue that if you scroll down in the list of mails, it automatically jumps back to the top. It turns out that one line of javascripts needs to disabled to solve this. I made a GreaseMonkey script that removed “window.scrollTo(0,1)” from the following line:
N.prototype.$=function(a,b){var c=a||window.orientation||0;this.bb=c;var d=this.j(this.h);if(c==0){d.style.width=”320px”;b&&_IframeEmbeddedExecution&&window.scrollTo(0,1)}else d.style.width=”480px”};